ns lounged round the Plaza wearing silk capes and velvet trousers and
buckled shoes, and Spanish _conquistadores_ rode past armed cap-a-pie,
and Spanish grand dames stole glances at the outside world through the
lattices of the mansion houses. In some of these old Spanish houses, you
will find the deep casement windows very high in the wall. I asked a
descendant of one of the old Spanish families why that was. "For
protection," she said.

"Indians?" I asked.

"No--Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside
world."

The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town.
Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert--all lie on
hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the
exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley
among the mountains, two castellated, five story adobe structures, one
on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the
houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they
are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are
practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment assigned
to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two
huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three
to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire
pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the
village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and
bullet, where General Price shelled it in the uprising of the pueblos
after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You
see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of
Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to
the roofs and can be drawn up--the pueblo way of bolting the door. The
houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color
outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly
inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these
ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the
Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls
over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing
blankets by beating them in the flowing water. Go up the succession of
ladders to the very top of a five storied house, and look out. You can
see the pasture fields, where t